Social Networks

Zynga reported an unexpectedly strong Q1 this week, but investors chose to focus on its lower guidance for future growth in the casual gaming industry. The company brought in $264 million in revenue on the quarter, down 18 percent from the same time a year ago but beating estimates that were closer ...

Shortly after 1 p.m. ET on Tuesday, the world just about ended as far as Wall Street was concerned, when the AP tweeted that President Obama had been injured by explosions at the White House. Within minutes, the Dow dropped 145 points. Shortly afterward, the AP reported its Twitter account had been ...

Can I be everywhere my customers want to shop? The good news is that this rhetorical question is not all that far-fetched any longer. In its day, the Sears catalog revolutionized the consumer shopping experience and ruled the market. Decades later, it has been rendered obsolete by the ultimate, inno...

Electronic Arts will shut down three of its less popular games on Facebook, citing waning interest in some of the company's social network offerings. Starting June 14, The Sims Social, SimCity Social and Pet Society will not be available to Facebook users. It was a difficult decision to kill the gam...

Twitter has officially announced its forthcoming push into the digital music space. After weeks of rumors, including one that promised such a service would officially launch over the weekend, Twitter has announced that something, indeed, is coming. On Friday, Twitter made public its music website. T...

Foursquare, the poster child for check-in tech when the trend was hot, announced this week that it has raised $41 million in a new financing round. The funding was provided by private-equity firm Silver Lake and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Spark Capital, and ...

LinkedIn on Thursday announced the $90 million acquisition of newsreader app Pulse, as the professional social networking site looks to add to its content and mobile strategies. Pulse, launched in 2010 by two Stanford University students, allows users to browse multiple media sources, including soci...

After almost two years of litigation, a federal judge has ruled on a dispute between an employer and former employee over control of a LinkedIn account. The case turned on a specific Pennsylvania law about using the likeness of another individual, so the impact may be limited, but since there is so ...

The Bloomberg business and financial news service has begun streaming Twitter feeds to the 310,000 subscribers to its Bloomberg Professional service, including many who work in front of the company's terminals that are widely used on Wall Street and in the finance industry. "Bloomberg has always pro...

Facebook fans will get the chance to have the social network take over their lock and home screens on certain Android phones as of April 12, thanks to the introduction of the company's Home apps. That prime mobile phone real estate will also serve as comfortable surroundings for advertisements when ...

The Securities and Exchange Commission released a new set of disclosure rules Tuesday that allow executives to use social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to update investors about significant corporate announcements that fall under Regulation Fair Disclosure mandates. As long as executives ...

Amazon announced Thursday that it had acquired Goodreads, the social networking site for bibliophiles. Goodreads will join Amazon's other online book communities, Shelfari and LibraryThing, as the retailer looks to expand its social insight into what book lovers are buying and sharing. Since its lau...

Zynga announced Thursday that it will be rolling out the full version of Zynga.com next week as part of the gaming company's ongoing process of decreasing its dependence on Facebook's social platform. Currently, gamers looking to play Zynga offerings such as Farmville have to sign in with their Face...

The social bookmarking site Pinterest, one of the fastest-growing social networks of the last two years, released a new analytics tool Tuesday so that users -- especially businesses and marketing professionals -- can do a better job of tracking traffic and sharing aspects of the site. Pinterest Web ...

Facebook unveiled its new look this week, providing bigger photos and more links in users' News Feeds, along with additional ways to view specialized streams based on topics of interest, such as music. This is apparently an attempt to corral all the random musings and disjointed pictures users are a...